Posts tagged google,privacy

Back in February 2012, the Wall Street Journal revealed how Google was able to quietly bypass privacy settings in Safari and track the sites people were browsing. The company eventually paid a $22.5 million penalty to the FTC, and now a group of Brits is seeking similar compensation. Google has be...

Wondering how long it would take for Google's search engine to find your website if you didn't promote it? About 22 days, according to Matthew Rothenberg. He recently launched Unindexed, a purposefully short-lived web community that was set to self-destruct as soon as Google's indexing technology ...

The US is already snooping on computers around the world, but Google is worried that it might be sneaking in a rule change that would sanction more nosy behavior. The search firm has filed comments protesting an advisory committee proposal that would let the government get warrants for "remote acc...

Three years ago Google merged more than 60 privacy policies into one gargantuan document, in the hope it would be simpler and more readable for its customers around the world. Some people were skeptical of the changes and, despite Google's best efforts to explain itself, the company was pulled int...

We still don't know everything about the information Google handed over to the government about three WikiLeaks employees, but a lawyer for the search giant has answered one question about the incident. While a gag order prevented Google from the three staff members, attorney Albert Gidari told th...

Google is catching some heat from WikiLeaks after the company revealed that it handed over emails and other data on three WikiLeaks employees to the US government. Obviously, that in and of itself would be enough to ruffle the feathers of the activist group. But, to make matters worse, Mountain Vi...

Those murmurs that Google was retooling its services for kids? Yep, they're real. The search giant tells USA Today that it's creating versions of its products for the 12-and-under crowd, with plans to start launching them in 2015. The company isn't saying just what content will get the child-frien...

The European Union wants Google to extend the range and impact of the "right to be forgotten" measures that passed earlier this year. The proposal would take the current limitation of EU-only domains like those ending in ".fr" and ".co.uk," and open it to traditional ".com" URLs, according to The ...

Not all online search removal requests come from Europe these days. A Tokyo court has ordered Google to delete 122 search results that linked an innocent man's name to crime, reportedly violating his rights and tarnishing his reputation. The judge in the case, Nobuyuki Seki, rejected Google's argu...

It's no secret that plenty of people are using (and abusing) the European Union's "right to be forgotten" online, but have you wondered just how these requests tend to break down? You won't have to wonder for much longer. Google has updated its Transparency Report with a new section for European s...

One of the biggest threats to your online privacy is the mixture of code that you'll find on some websites. It's all too easy for a legit-looking page to hide data-stealing code, or for innocent sites to accidentally expose your info. If Google, Mozilla and researchers have their way, though, you ...

Apple isn't the only one that's making its software a lot more secure, and erm, fed-proof -- Google's upcoming Android platform will apparently be encrypted by default, according to The Washington Post. The publication didn't clarify whether it's Android's full-disk encryption, which Google first ...

You might need to change your email password in the very near future. A member at a Russian Bitcoin forum has posted almost 5 million Gmail passwords, around 60 percent of which are reportedly still working. It's not clear how the poster managed to scoop up all this account info, but Google tells ...

A few days ago, a Brazilian judge ordered Apple and Google to pull Secret from the local app store and wipe it from the handsets of whose who had downloaded it. The same ruling covered Microsoft, who was ordered to do the same to Windows Phone clone Cryptic. So far, however, only Apple has begun t...

Google has long used automatic image scanning to fight online child exploitation, but it's now clear that this monitoring applies to email, too. Houston police have arrested a registered sex offender after Google tipped them off to illegal photos of children in his Gmail account. The notice only ...

Google has previously offered a little bit of insight into how it handles (and occasionally mishandles) the EU's "right to be forgotten" (RTBF) requests, but it has largely been a nebulous process. How do you know whether or not you'll be scrubbed from search results? Well, things just got a littl...

Google has already drawn fire from various European nations for allegedly violating users' privacy through its unified data policy, but Italy is more than willing to join the fray. The country's data protection agency has given Google 18 months to obey local laws and change how it handles your per...

Everyone makes mistakes... just some of them are a little more costly than others. A Goldman Sachs employee made a rather serious error when instead of sending a message to a gs.com email address, it went to a stranger with a Gmail account. That might sound innocent enough, except this email happe...

Maybe you've seen Into the Wild, or (gasp) have actually read it. It's the true story of an ordinary person who, one day, decided to abandon society, pack some rice and a rifle into a bag and head off into the wilderness never to return. It's the sort of drastic move you rarely hear about in our m...